The following is an exclusive interview conducted by PWMania.com with former TNA star / current Global Force Wrestling star Nick Aldis, aka Magnus.
Magnus talks about how he came to sign with TNA Wrestling, leaving the company for GFW and his future there, his engagement to former WWE Diva / TNA Knockout Mickie James, and more. You can read a few excerpts below:
Signing with TNA: “It’s funny, I showed up and I had signed with them and I had one conversation through a mutual friend with Impact. The next thing I know Dixie (Carter) just emailed me directly and said how you would feel about coming to America and signing with us. I just went, ‘ah..okay’. It just happened so fast. I still had commitments with Gladiators, the actual TV show over in the UK so I just said these are the dates of filming, this is the second season. I have this acting commitment in a play and it just happened to tie in perfectly with the UK tour so it just then when I debuted. They flew me in during a brief off period they had because I was so busy with that period that I literally had four days when I didn’t have anything in like a whole three month spell.“So they brought me to Nashville to do some vignettes. I got here and saw this and I just had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea of what the character was going to be and I asked them what I should bring and they said just bring workout gear because we’re going to do shots of you working out and stuff and I was okay, it made sense. Then they have me doing voice overs for my vignettes and maybe for a video game thing too, I can’t remember. I then see this piece of paper with these lines on it and it said ‘Brutus Magnus’ on it and I had just said to someone what’s that, what does that mean? They responded…’oh, that’s your name’. I was oh, cool I didn’t know that, okay. (chuckles) Then they started to lay out what the character was going to be. It was very vague at first, they just said it was going to be this modern day gladiator. So I said based off of my character from the show? Because my character on the TV show was the irony of it. I really got over on that TV show, on Gladiators by being like a pro wrestler. Loud and obnoxious and cutting promos and just being outrageous and being an entertainer. It was unlike being a boring, stoic gladiator like the rest of the guys were being. Then, I come to this pro wrestling company, who said we want you to be this stoic, boring gladiator. I was too young and too respectful to say to anyone but in my mind I would think, have they even seen the show?”
His future with GFW: ” I had an established relationship with Jeff (Jarrett) and with Sonjay (Dutt). It was just one of those things where when it ended it with TNA it was all very amicable. I had very good times with TNA. I hope that they pull through and I hope that things work out for them. I basically made the decision that I wanted to be afforded a little more latitude as somebody that had given a lot of time to the business. But because of my age, it was that seen as that oh, you’re just a wrestler. I’m not saying that I want to be a booker or anything like that it was just talking to Jeff and having an established relationship him and having him give me a lot of trust in India and in other times. I saw an opportunity to help something grow and be a part of it from its near start up.
“Basically, what it allowed me to do is as a performer it gives me a chance to work with some new people and to gives me a chance to be a part of something with energy and buzz rather than with something with so much negativity always around it. As a person, I was nearing some opportunities from an entrepreneurial side which I can’t really elaborate on at this point but I’m a business man and I have interests outside of pro wrestling and this is a really nice way for me to explore some of those opportunities too. There are a lot of really exciting things coming up and I know it’s a really cliché thing that people say a lot but there is very imminent stuff on the horizon that I’m involved in on a macro level that will be really exciting for me personally.“
Being engaged to Mickie James: “For the most part it’s been easy. It wasn’t necessarily something I expected, or something that I had planned on. I think we have a pretty healthy balance. We both love the business. That’s one of the reasons she good at it and exceptional at it because she’s a fan of the business and has a very good mind for the business, philosophically and mechanically. There will be times when one of us will be talking about something or we’ll be watching something. We DVR everything. We don’t necessarily watch it all as it happens but we do DVR everything, WWE, New Japan, Ring of Honor, TNA, Lucha Underground which I think is fantastic by the way. We’ll sit there and we’ll watch it and we’ll say what we like and what we don’t like and then other times we’ll get to a point where one of us will just say okay, no more wrestling. Let’s do something else. I think we have a pretty healthy balance. Certainly now as we enter this era of new frontier where we are starting to delve in with some things with Global on a more than just wrestling level, we know you have to have that passion and interest in the genre in that respect we’re a good support system for each other. We’re a business and we’re a business together. Anything that we’re doing a business partnership at the same time. At the moment everything is very happy and healthy in that regard.”
